Chapter 12

Lamentation

Just like Snow, sometimes grief comes one flake at a time.  Other times it comes like a blizzard.  It melts away, but then it always comes back.

--Julia Cook, author of Grief Is Like A Snowflake

After Zach’s death, I began reading material from others who had lost children or other family members.  I needed a road map to lead me through the searing emptiness.  One of the hardest things to do is put pain into words.  Books I found the most healing were C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, Gerald Sittser’s A Grace Disguised:  How a Soul Grows Through Loss, William Paul Young’s The Shack, and Nicolas Wolterstorff’s Lament For A Son.   Others’ experiences anchored me during the pinnacle of pain when I thought I was going crazy.  The brave ones who had dared to write about their raw, honest descriptions of suffering after loss gave me the right to express and feel my own heartache.

The scariest part of grief is not knowing what to do with the intensity of it and not knowing whether the feelings are normal or not.  At its worst, I can only liken it to what a psychotic breakdown must feel like.  Only in reading others’ experiences could I normalize what I was feeling.  We live in a culture that expects people to get over things quickly.  Our fast-paced world does not slow down for grief.  After Zach died, grief felt like a lonely, isolating experience.  I yearned to wail openly and express the deep wells of my pain physically.  I craved an outlet for unspoken pain.  My inward grief was terrifyingly loud, but outwardly it was silent.  I felt compelled to keep my inner world hidden from the public eye.  It took all of my energy to contain the wildness of it.  I wanted to wear black all day, so people would know.  I wanted permission to fall apart.  When people asked how I was doing, I did not want to feel obligated to say I was fine to make them feel more comfortable.  Wolterstorff’s Lament For a Son in particular helped me feel freer to share my pain.  When people ask Wolterstorff about himself, he shares the usual things people talk about in conversation, but he always tells them about the son he lost.  He explains that his loss will forever be a part of his identity and he cannot and will not disown it.  He calls his lament a love-song.¹ He helped shift my focus to the loving aspect of grief. Grief is not something to get over.  It is intimate and entered into with courage.  Losing anyone we love hurts beyond description, but losing a child takes pain past the threshold of tolerance. 

Wolterstorff calls a child’s death a “wrenching alteration of expectations.”² A parent never expects to outlive his or her child. Since the moment of my children’s conceptions, I carried an overwhelming desire to protect them.  In my womb, they experienced how I lived my life, so I became overly concerned about eating well, getting lots of rest and exercise, and living peacefully so their lives inside of me would be enriching. I had wanted my babies to have the best of everything.  After they were born, I watched them grow from being totally dependent on me to learning and discovering how to be their own people.  I delighted in their joys and sorrowed in their pain.  But now, my first-born was no more.  Life was never meant to take place without Zach.  I would never have the joy of watching him grow into a man.  I thought about parents who have lost their children suddenly in traumatic accidents and have made the decision to donate their organs.  Organ donation would be a way of keeping a part of them alive here on earth.  Cancer robbed me even of  that.  I could not salvage any part of Zach’s physical body because organs are not accepted from people who die of disease.  I thought perhaps I would be able to cope if I knew someone had life because of Zach.  I imagined his heart beating in someone.  I thought of looking into his beautiful eyes again, even if those eyes belonged to somebody else.  I longed for something tangible to touch and feel.  My arms ached to feel him.

The unfairness of it all bounced around inside of me like shards of glass, cutting and abrasive, and I recognized the same pain in Carter. Doug and I grieved our son while Carter grieved his brother. No child should have to watch his brother die. One evening, I found Zach’s bear, Mocha, on Carter’s bed. Mocha had been Zach’s favourite since he was born, and right up until his last breath, he held Mocha in his arms.  Mocha had gone everywhere with Zach when he was little, and his old childhood friend brought him much comfort in his dying. As I kissed Carter good night, he put Mocha on his side table, fearful Zach’s smell would go away if he slept with his treasured bear.  Once his smell was gone, all that was tangible of Zach would disappear and Carter wanted to hang on to his presence.  Another night, I went into Carter’s room to take Lucky off his bed and put her in her kennel, and I noticed he was sleeping with all of Zach’s necklaces on.  His heart ached to be surrounded by Zach’s things.  Heavy-hearted, I went up to Zach’s room, longing to be near him, too.  I looked in Zach’s closet at the clothes still in his laundry bucket.  His favourite pair of pajamas and a few other things were tucked inside.  I buckled under the sorrow.  I never knew love could be large enough to hurt this much.  The only way to make it through this season of heart pain was to join hands as a family and bleed together, each in our own way, but together.

Over three hundred people came to Zach’s memorial service on May 15th, 2010. For my last birthday, Zach and Carter had given me a bright yellow pair of gumboots. When I wore them I felt so happy that I wanted to stop in the middle of the street and dance a jig. To honour Zach’s fun spirit, I asked everyone coming to his funeral to wear bright-coloured gumboots during his memorial service. In the days leading up to his memorial, assorted boot vases with colourful flowers started arriving at our door from family and friends. Zach’s funeral was filled with colour and full of life as everyone sang, worshipped, celebrated his life, and grieved his death.  It is important to celebrate a life, but it is equally important to grieve a death. To celebrate without grieving diminishes the love, because grieving is a form of love. I soaked in the colourful sunflowers lining the stage, the memories of Zach’s life, and the fragrance of worship, but at the same time my whole body throbbed with the merciless floodwaters of sorrow. When Zach’s friend, Keegan Marchand, spoke about Zach, a dam of emotions burst within me.  A twelve-year-old boy bravely stood in front of hundreds and spoke about his friend and his pain:

Zach and I met when we were eight years old in grade three. This is when Zach first started school at McGowan Park Elementary. We were in the same class for the next five years, and I have many good memories of our time together.

For one thing, Zach always had great birthday parties tubing up at Harper Mountain. It was such a blast running up the hill to the top and racing down on the tubes trying so hard to bang into each other! When I think back to our early elementary years, Zach and I played a lot with Legos at his house, and we swam a lot at my house. He seemed to have a passion for whatever he was doing at the moment. It didn’t take me long to learn that Zach was always smiling. He was such a happy and enthusiastic friend!

Even in the past ten months since Zach was diagnosed with his cancer, he never lost his positive and fun-loving spirit. Because of his continued outgoing personality, I would never have guessed he wasn’t one hundred percent.

In January, when Zach wasn’t coming to school regularly anymore, he did manage to come to school for lunch to celebrate his birthday with our class. At that time, Zach was on quite a strict diet. So . . . for his birthday party, one of the moms made cupcakes for all of us and “special” ones for Zach. Zach’s were made with artificial sugar and other healthy ingredients. There’s no doubt that this mom went to a lot of trouble to make something healthy and appropriate for Zach. Well . . . I don’t know how many people know this, but our teacher got mixed up and ended up giving Zach the wrong cupcakes. By the time she realized it, Zach was on his second cupcake saying, “Oh, these are so good!” Zach hadn’t had sugary food for so long, no wonder they tasted so good. Our teacher was horrified, but what could she do? She just smiled politely and ended up choking down Zach’s “healthy” cupcakes herself!

There’s no doubt that in the last few months, one of Zach’s greatest joys was food. You name it, he loved it: popcorn, ribs, and, of course, Dairy Queen Blizzards. I was lucky enough, along with some of our other friends, to have a couple of great sushi feasts with Zach. Most thirteen-year-olds would order the typical California rolls. Not Zach! The last time we went out for sushi, Zach ordered one of his favourite dishes that included eel. To be honest with you, the thought of eating eel did not appeal to me at all. When I asked Zach if eel was good, he said with his usual enthusiasm and excitement, “Oh, ya! It tastes like chicken . . . only a little chewier!” I’m not so sure about that but the next time I’m out for sushi, I’m going to try eel, just for you, Zach.

It is so hard to lose a friend like Zach. It is so hard because he was literally one of a kind. Zach was always smiling, right to the end. Zach was always so positive and polite. Zach never judged anyone, and everyone was his friend. Zach loved his life. Zach loved his family. He especially loved his little brother, Carter. Zach loved God. My life is so much richer because Zach was my friend. Zach is a true inspiration, and we should all try to live our lives the way Zach lived his.

I was so proud of Keegan.  He had so much trouble not crying, yet he faced his sadness and shared his heart.  His bravery gave me the courage to face my own pain.  His stories about Zach brought back memories I had forgotten about and even in the midst of my unbearable sadness, I smiled as Keegan shared his recollections.

Shortly after Keegan’s thoughts were shared, we watched a slideshow of Zach’s life.  As the pictures of his slideshow flashed memories of our lives together, I longed to sink into the pictures and relive moments in time: his arrival into the world, birthdays, and family vacations. The images soothed and hurt like salve and salt in wounds at the same time. I could not silence the deafening roar of grief.  Like author Gerald Sittser during his season of grief, I felt “punished simply by being alive as tears turned to brine, to a bitter and burning sensation of loss that tears could no longer express.”³

As we left the service, the emptiness suffocated. I did not have the energy to talk anymore. I felt smothered. God, you need to pour your balm on my wounds.  I feel like I am being buried alive. He whispered back, “My grace will sustain you. I will not let you fall. Lean into me and soak in my strength.” I felt I had experienced a second death. The farewell made it final. Zach was really gone.  I did not grieve as one with no hope, but even so, Zach was gone.  Once again, Wolterstorff put words to my grief-stricken mother’s heart:

There is a hole in the world now.  In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing…there’s nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved…Never again will anyone inhabit the world the way he did…The world is emptier.  My son is gone.  Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled.”⁴

When I closed my eyes, they ached from holding back tears and not having enough sleep. The past year had been one long, awful vision of hell and now we had to learn to claw our way out of its depths back into the land of the living. The living felt like too much work. To begin the climb from darkness back into the light felt like hiking Everest without oxygen support. Each slow agonizing step screamed at us to give up the fight. It was too much, too far, and the darkness was too thick. I was exhausted from trying to be normal, but my fatigue did not bring on sleep. I would fall asleep only to be jolted awake, gasping for air. All night long, I would drift off and then startle awake, panicked and confused. Even sleep brought no peace. I finally gave in to sleeping medication to ease the long, restless nights.

A few weeks after the funeral, the phone rang, snapping me out of my fog. It was the principal from McGowan Park School.  The office had Zach’s belongings and she wanted to know if she could drop off his things.  She brought over his blue backpack with his lunch kit and school supplies, bits of loose paper and old Ziploc bags at the bottom.  Sharp stabs of heartache made it difficult to breathe.  Among Zach’s things were his school files since kindergarten.  As I leafed through his old report cards, something in me cracked.  This pain did not feel normal.  I was torn in two by feelings of longing and remorse.  After grade seven, there would be no more report cards for Zach.  This was the end of his life.  The heartbreak surrounding me each day had no limits.  Mother’s Day came a week after Zach’s death.  Friends invited us to their place for lunch after church. Torn between needing to be alone and fear of being alone, our family decided to accept their offer.  Moments after arriving at their house, I realized I had made a mistake.  Seeing families together was like acid on my heart.  Thankfully, having a puppy at home gave me an excuse to leave.  I ran towards home, went into my garden, and exploded into tears.  Reminders of Zach blindsided me each day.  I would go into the garage to get something and see his white skate shoes on the rack, with his different coloured shoe strings still tied after our last walk together.  I looked inside to see the outline of his feet on the insoles.  Fresh dirt still lingered from only a few weeks before.  I would look through the pockets of his coat to find Ziploc bags of pain medications.  Every day the ache surpassed any emotion I had ever known.  The only thing that got me through painful moments such as these were people’s continued support on my blog, reminding me that they would never forget our son and his impact of their lives.  Laurie Marchand, Keegan’s mom, wrote about her son’s tribute to Zach:

Today Keegan competed in the School District’s Zone 1500m race. When the race began, Keegan took off like a bullet, I suppose to be in front of the other twenty or so runners. He sprinted so fast off the starting line, everyone in the stands (including me!) was sure he was going to crash and burn. Well, he continued to run very fast and after the first 400m, he was still in the lead. Another parent, who is a very experienced runner, yelled across the stands at me, “What is Keegan doing? He has come out way too fast!” I just knew he’d never be able to keep up the pace.

To the surprise of us all, he managed to continue this crazy pace and Keegan led the race to the end. He won his very first 1^st place ribbon for the 1500m. His smile had never been so big. When I finally got to talk to him, I said, “Congratulations! Where did THAT come from?”  This is what Keegan told me: “When I woke up this morning, I said to myself, “I’m going to win the race today . . . I’m going to win it for Zach.” I cried. He smiled. He knew he had never run that fast in his life and he told me he had thought of Zach the entire way.

When Laurie told me what Keegan had done I wept happy tears.  Knowing Keegan had poured out his heart for his friend soothed my soul.  Like Carter, Keegan is a gifted athlete, so it made sense that both of them would honour Zach through their sports.  In the same way Carter had dedicated his soccer game to his brother the day he died, Keegan had devoted his run to his friend. 

Soon after Laurie told me about Keegan’s race, a hurting man who attended our church wrote me a letter about how Zach’s life brought him redemption: 

At the Sunday service, the pastor sadly announced the passing of Zach. I overheard people talking about his faith and his love for God.  They talked about his bravery as he battled cancer and shared about the love he had for his little brother, Carter.  He touched everyone’s life at church in one way or another.  The pastor asked people to pray for your family and I found myself praying for the first time in twenty years. After hearing about Zach, I wanted to attend his funeral.  On May 15, the day of his memorial, I listened to his friend Keegan tell his stories about Zach and I started to weep. I was a hardened man with no care for anything at the time —weeping?  Zach saved my life and the lives of others. He inspired me to keep going to church and his story opened my eyes and softened my heart so I could see the truth. I now believe that “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.” Today, I walk hand in hand with Christ and the dark thoughts and feelings I had are gone. Today, I am able to forgive so I can be healed. I look forward to meeting Zach in heaven so I can thank him for helping a broken man find God so I could have life again.

Anonymous

God’s heart came through everyone’s comments. People’s hearts burned with love, broken people were being made whole, and lives were being transformed. The stamp of Isaiah 61 became the underlying theme of our family’s story as God began to weave a beautiful tapestry out of our heartache.  Strangely, our pain began to give off a sweet fragrance to the world.  God held our tragedy in the palm of his hand, giving even our deepest suffering purpose.  Knowing God was turning pain into beauty softened our sorrow slightly, but all too soon, sharp pangs of grief would send me back into the world of darkness again.  

In June, Zach’s school, McGowan Park Elementary, organized an assembly of remembrance for Zach, dedicating a bench in his honour. Doug and his friend Brent were invited to sing a worship song, and they chose Matt Redman’s “Never Let Go.” As they sang the lyrics, I sensed a deeper level of God’s stirring.  He was working life out of death.  C.S. Lewis describes pain as a “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”⁵ Could it be that Zach’s story was a “ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28), a life radiating in the darkness to restore hope to those who had grown weary of life’s trials? I saw foreshadows of this during his suffering, but in his death I felt the power of his story even more. God highlighted words from Brennan Manning’s book Patched Together to me: “[Zach], for many years the people have forgotten, they have fallen asleep. Your pain and longing roused them, helped them to begin to remember something they lost along the way. Your journey and story have called them to life.”⁶

After the song, Zach’s teacher, Mrs. Oryschak, dedicated a trophy in Zach’s honour to be awarded to any team winning the zone or city championship.  The principal presented Zach’s bench entitled “Praise You in this Storm” that would sit in the center courtyard of the school.  We borrowed the phrase “praise you in this storm” from the band Casting Crowns because the lyrics perfectly described Zach’s heart as he weathered the storms of suffering and death.  Even after all he had been through, the raging storms, the loss of dreams, and the seeming absence of God’s presence, he had still heard God whisper, “I am with you.”  Through it all, through every tear he had cried, God had held onto his hand and Zach had praised him in the storm.  Zach left a legacy for his school, his friends, and even for strangers who heard about his story. God promised to make beauty out of ashes, and I could see him at work restoring all that had been stolen from us.

The grade seven year-end assembly at McGowan Park Elementary was possibly the most difficult thing for me to endure after Zach’s death. The kindergarten class presented the grade seven students with roses commemorating their graduation to high school. As I looked at the little children, I realized how fast time had gone. It seemed like only a moment ago that I had held Zach’s hand to take him to his first day of school.  Zach, with his new school clothes, adorable toothless grin, and uncertainty about being away from home for the first time.  He should have been going into grade eight with his whole life ahead of him, but as the grade sevens lined up to receive their roses, I scanned the line to the open spot where he should have been. The kids lined up in alphabetical order, so I knew when his name should have been called, but sadly it was not mentioned. In that moment, it was as though nobody remembered the awful void. He should have been there celebrating his achievements with his peers. He had gotten straight A’s in spite of his treatments and surgeries and he deserved to be there, dressed up in a suit and tie, celebrating his accomplishments and his future.  I wondered what it would be like to watch his friends grow up. My mind whirred.  Will I look at them and wonder if Zach would have been that tall? Will I always be making comparisons, trying to fill in the gaps of my missing memories? What will it be like to see all of them graduate from high school, head off to university, and find their way in the world? I left the assembly sad and angry with all that would never be. 

Like that hard day in June at Zach’s school, the days and months after Zach’s death brought landslides of sorrow.  We lived in what authors Brent Curtis and John Eldredge describe as the “middle of a story that is sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, [and] often a confusing mixture of both.”³ We had no idea how to find our way through our web of hurt.   Everything we did reminded us of our loss. Memories lurked around every corner, ready to ambush us. When we went to Shuswap Lake during the summer after Zach’s death, we remembered the times we had taken kayaks out to go cliff jumping and times we had pulled the boys behind the boat.  We recollected warm summer days when Zach and Carter had played for endless hours in the water; moments when we had all been together. Now, the lake was not the same without Zach. Carter especially seemed lost.  He did not know how to be in our family without his brother. Doug and I tried to fill in the gap by being extra playful, extra funny, and extra intentional about making sure his needs were met, but nothing could fill Zach’s absence. None of us talked as much as Zach had, so the quietness became uncomfortable. Everything felt awkward and forced. Our family did not function well without our chatty, fun-loving Zach.

On our way home from Shuswap Lake, Carter said he felt sick. His grief made him feel physically unwell. People’s grief often manifests in physical symptoms. For Carter, he felt perpetually sick to his stomach. His chronic stomachache was his body’s way of complaining about the stress it had been required to contain. He had endured too many losses.  In the same way Carter’s grief presented in physical symptoms, Doug’s did as well.  Doug had begun to experience debilitating sciatic back pain three weeks before Zach died.  Sometimes when emotional pain becomes unbearable, the mind compensates by reducing oxygen to certain parts of the body, diverting attention from the more intolerable pain of heartache. 

We could not escape from the aftershock of trauma.  Because Doug was in so much agony, he was still unable to take part in many of our family activities.   While emotional and physical pain continued to lambast us, we received word that Maureen’s cancer was worsening. Once again, dark clouds loomed over our family.  We were suspended in one long painful story with no end in sight.  Not surprisingly, Carter did not feel like praying at night. One night, when I asked him how God was helping him through his pain, he looked at me and said, “God has not done a thing to help me.”  My heart hurt for him.  We all felt like Carter did some of the time.  He just had the courage to say it out loud.  His heart was ravaged, left broken open, hollow, and alone.  He added God to his growing list of disappointments. 

We were all disappointed with God and each of us grieved his silence and our trauma differently.  As the darkness persisted, I wrote out pages and pages of longings and lamentations in my journal.  I wanted to talk about my pain, whereas, Doug and Carter grieved silently, processing their sorrow internally rather than externally.  Our grief was as different as our personalities.  Sometimes my need to voice my emotions was overwhelming for Doug and Carter.  They needed some distance from the intensity of our suffering.  Their quieter way of grieving sometimes hurt my feelings.  Demonstrative grief somehow seemed more appropriate to me.  Each of us had to learn to appreciate and make room for our different ways of coping.  I had to learn not to dump everything in my heart onto them, and they had to learn to talk about their pain a little bit more.  We had to value the way each of us made it through each day.

I waited patiently for the Lord to help me, and he turned to me and heard my cry.

He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire.

He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along.

Psalm 40:1-3 (NLT)